User Intent as a Bandwidth Conservation Heuristic in Shared Virtual Environments

A shared virtual environment (SVE) architecture must ensure that users have an up-to-date view of the world by communicating state between them. However, due to bandwidth constraints, it is impossible to propagate every event to every user in a timely manner. At any given time a user intends to interact with some subset of the SVE entities; in this paper we discuss how knowledge of this intent can provide information about the events in which he is interested, making it possible to improve bandwidth usage by prioritising delivery of those events. From this premise we develop EMLIN, a language that allows entities within an SVE to be described in terms of the interactions they support. EMLIN compiles to C++ code that chooses a state dissemination protocol based on users’ intent. As a user’s intent changes with time, the relative priority with which events are sent to him changes accordingly.